Chapter 35: Crisis of the House Divided
The Rule of Law on the Precipice
The focus of last weeks’ post – Chapter 34: A Nation in Peril, Lincoln’s Warning – was on Abraham Lincoln’s first memorable speech, his Lyceum address on January 27, 1838. This speech was a ringing condemnation of mob violence, which was common in the United States in the 1830s. To combat the chaos of the mob, Lincoln focused on the law. “Reverence for the law” was needed to counteract the mindless violence of street justice.
Twenty years later, on June 16, 1858, Lincoln delivered one of his immortal speeches. The occasion was his acceptance of the Republican Party’s nomination for the Senate from Illinois. The issue that racked the nation when Lincoln gave this speech was the spread of slavery.
“Slavery agitation,” Lincoln said, was increasing. “It will not cease,” he declared, “until a crisis shall be reached and passed.” Then he said, quoting Matthew 12:25
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”1
The United States is today a house divided against itself. Will it stand? Does a crisis need to be reached and passed before we can know? What are the stakes?
The first pillar of the American way of life which Trump has put on the chopping block is the rule of law. As he said, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”2 He is viciously attacking judges who rule against him. Here is what he tweeted (or “truthed” on Truth Social) concerning Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, on March 18:
As it happens, Judge Boasberg was originally appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush (no radical left lunatic he) as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia where he served from 2002 to 2011. President Obama elevated him to the U.S. District Court for D.C. Among Judge Boasberg’s rulings were that Hillary Clinton’s emails should be released and that Trump’s taxes should not be.3
Nevertheless, quick as a wink following Trump’s tweet, a resolution to impeach Judge Boasberg was introduced in the House by Representative Brandon Gill (R,TX) on Tuesday, March 18.4
Trump’s outburst prompted a statement by the usually somnolent Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. “For more than two centuries,” Roberts said, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”5 Trump’s response to the Roberts statement was: “He [Roberts] didn’t mention my name in the statement. I just saw it quickly. He didn’t mention my name. But many people have called for his [Boasberg’s] impeachment. The impeachment of this judge. I don’t know who the judge is. He is radical left. He is Obama-appointed.”6
Why Roberts issued this statement is something of a mystery. What he said is common knowledge. Indeed, if there is one thing that Trump knows, it is that you can defeat the American judicial process by endlessly appealing decisions. Moreover, along with Mitch McConnell and a handful of other enablers, Roberts is one of the individuals most responsible for making it possible for Trump to avoid being held accountable for his crimes. Roberts is the author of the majority opinion in Trump versus the United States.7 This decision effectively makes it impossible to prosecute a President. Trump is above the law. No wonder that when he greeted Roberts on the floor of the House of Representatives on March 4, he said: “Thank you again, I won’t forget it,” and he “appreciatively slapped Roberts on the back. . . .”8 Donald knows who his friends are.
The rule of law which is essential to a democracy is now sometimes spoken of in the past tense in our nation. If it is not quite dead yet, it is gasping for breath, on life support. Trump will deliver the coup de grace if and when he violates a direct order by the Supreme Court. This assumes the doubtful circumstance that the Supreme Court would actually issue such an order.
What is it like to live in a society unprotected by the rule of law? We know the answer to this question by looking at Germany during the Nazi era or at Russia during Stalin and at this very moment during Putin. We do not, however, have to look abroad to answer this question. We need only to look at our own history, specifically at the 11 states of the old Confederacy in the century following the retreat from Reconstruction, which is usually dated at 1877.
Following the Union victory in the Civil War in 1865, there was a remarkable but all too brief effort to establish a biracial democracy in the states that seceded. The triumphs of Reconstruction were impressive. “More than two thousand southern freedmen won elective office in the 1870s, including fourteen congressmen and two U.S. senators. At one point, more than 40 percent of legislators in Louisiana’s and South Carolina’s lower houses were Black.”9
Reconstruction’s triumphs included citizenship for millions of former slaves. They included the first public schools in the South and other such initiatives. Of vital importance, these triumphs included the enfranchisement of millions of African-Americans. Reconstruction’s achievements would have been impossible without Black voting rights.
Tragically, these achievements were eroded and finally overwhelmed. Southern whites embarked upon a campaign to put an end to African-American voting. The campaign was a startling success. In South Carolina, Black turnout was 96 percent in 1876 but 11 percent 22 years later. In the South as a whole, Black turnout fell from 61 percent in 1880 to 2 percent in 1912.10
With the disenfranchisement of African-Americans came an all-American homegrown dystopia. Recall Lincoln’s horror at the lynching of Francis McIntosh in 1836. After the collapse of Reconstruction, lynching were commonplace in the South. There were well over 6,000 of them. They were an essential bulwark of the terror state created in the old Confederacy.
Lynchings were not the monuments of shame which they would be in a civilized society. To the contrary, they were celebrated. They were covered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out the horrific details. “Photos of victims, with exultant white observers posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display. Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women.”11 Violence targeting African-Americans “had become . . . an accepted fact of life” in Florida by 1950, to choose one example among many. According to one investigation, “[T]here had been so many mob executions in one [Florida] county that ‘never [did] a Negro live long enough to go to trial.’”12
According to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, "The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization – one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. . . . [E]xtreme polarization can kill democracies.”13 Or, in other words, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” We are presently living through our crisis of the house divided.
On October 25, 1858, Senator William H. Seward (who would later become Lincoln’s Secretary of State) declared that there was an “irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces . . . [and] the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”14 The phrase “irrepressible conflict” became nationally famous.
The question the United States faces today is: Is our country on the cusp of an irrepressible conflict now? If so, what does that conflict consist of? The nation is not dealing with anything as fundamental as slavery versus freedom. Nevertheless, some citizens do view the survival of the rule of law and of democracy as of more urgent concern than do others.
Abraham Lincoln was profoundly dedicated to the rule of law and to the proposition that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the Earth. That proposition is being tested in the United States today. The outcome is very much in doubt.
When all the factors are considered, one could argue that if there is an irrepressible conflict it comes down to a single individual. Half the nation views Donald Trump as an appropriate President. The other half does not. You are either for him or against him. An issue as stark as this makes compromise impossible.
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/housedivided.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/politics/trump-saves-country-quote.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DHls8tFMU8
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/229/text/ih?overview=closed&format=txt
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/18/us/trump-president-news?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20250318&instance_id=150319&nl=from-the-times®i_id=248007335&segment_id=193771&user_id=f2694454c5b4f3652c1948d3426d8ec4#chief-justice-roberts-impeachment-trump
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5201997-trump-roberts-federal-judge-deportation-case/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
https://newrepublic.com/article/192949/john-roberts-rebuke-trump-judges
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin, 2019) p. 89.
Levitsky and Ziblatt, Democracies, pp. 90-91
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-lynching-america/
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (New York: Vintage, 2011) pp. 61-62.
Levitsky and Ziblatt, Democracies, p. 9.
http://www.nyhistory.com/central/conflict.htm